Content about “

medicine and health

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People have been using gold particles dispersed in water — gold hydrosols — for medical purposes for over 1000 years. Recently, hydrosols containing gold nanoparticles have become particularly popular because they have exciting potential in cancer therapies, pregnancy tests and blood sugar monitoring.

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions and the World Health Organisation estimates that, by 2015, about 3 billion adults will be overweight or obese worldwide. These individuals will be at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and osteoarthritis.

Which drug should you choose if your budget is finite?

When is a medical treatment worth its cost?

How to evaluate medical treatments

Controlled chaos produces realistic behaviour in robotic cockroach

Making sure that vaccination works

We have all become more aware of the dangers of influenza this year, but why is it so dangerous? Julia Gog explains that the unusual structure of the influenza genome can lead to dangerous evolutionary jumps, and how mathematics is helping to understand how the virus replicates.

An activity for the classroom

Think drug-induced hallucinations, and the whirly, spirally, tunnel-vision-like patterns of psychedelic imagery immediately spring to mind. But it's not just hallucinogenic drugs that conjure up these geometric structures. People have reported seeing them in near-death experiences, following sensory deprivation, or even just after applying pressure to the eyeballs. So what can these patterns tell us about the structure of our brains?